From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:06:23 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] logging branch deletion to help recovering from mistakes
Message-ID: <20101207170623.GB21749@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <7vmxoiqeoq.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

On Mon, Dec 06, 2010 at 10:28:53PM -0800, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> > Should this special log be mentioned in git-update-ref.txt or
> > gitrepository-layout.txt?
> 
> Perhaps, but I wasn't sure if this patch itself is a good idea to begin
> with.  Not the problem it tries to solve, but its approach.
> 
> For example, this cannot be shown with "reflog show" or "log -g" due to
> the way these frontends locate the reflog file to read (the logic wants to
> have an underlying ref).

Yeah, I think this is not _quite_ what people want in this area. A base
requirement from past discussions, I think, is that the whole reflog of
the deleted branch be saved rather than just the tip. And then "reflog
show" would make a lot more sense on such saved reflogs.

I'm not sure in practice how important that distinction is, as we are
not saving deleted branch reflogs _at all_ right now, so the
requirements are mostly speculation at this point.

The most recent discussion I recall is this one:

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/144250/focus=145353

where the general idea was to just keep deleted reflogs around, append
to them if the branch was recreated, and use a consistent renaming
scheme to avoid D/F naming conflicts (e.g., "foo" is a deleted ref, and
you create "foo/bar").

-Peff